IF you're not deep into martial arts cinema, you might have walked by the various movies titled Ip Man on the DVD shelves and mistaken them for Chinese or Japanese sci-fi or fantasy.

But the legendary Ip Man (also spelled Yip Man) is no invention of screenwriters: he's a famous figure in Chinese martial arts, guardian of several martial arts styles and the man who taught Bruce Lee.

Movie review

The Grandmaster

Starring Tony Leung and Zhang Ziyi

Grant Park

106 minutes

3 stars

Other voices

There are sequences in Hong Kong director Wong Kar-wai's new film, The Grandmaster, that are as gorgeous as anything you'll see on a screen this year, or perhaps this decade.

-- Liam Lacey, Globe and Mail

I've never been a big fan of Wong's phantasmagoric prettiness, but at least here it provides a welcome corrective to the usual martial-arts mayhem.

-- Peter Rainer, Christian Science Monitor

For those who aren't ardent students of kung fu's schools and styles, however, the movie is, for most of its length, a lifeless snore.

The Grandmaster is the latest version of his life to make it onto the screen, a regal, majestic and downright arty take on this teacher, champion and philosopher whose life spanned much of the 20th century. Co-writer/director Wong Kar Wai (Chungking Express, In the Mood for Love) goes for stately in this slow-moving action epic, sometimes at the expense of coherence and always in preference to pacing.

Fortunately, he has his muse, the great Tony Leung (In the Mood for Love, Hero, Red Cliff) in the title role, a magnetic screen presence who suggests mystery, romance and humility with just a faint, cryptic smile. His stillness seems just right for a character who can lick any 10 guys in the room, and knows it.

The story follows Ip Man through the Second World War when much of China was under siege by the Japanese, but whose martial arts aristocracy was still fretting over the divisions between assorted northern styles and Ip Man's simple, lethal southern style.

The grandmaster of the north (Wang Qingxiang) is about to pass his mantle on to a protege (Zhang Jin), but Ma San is a hothead, which makes Master Gong regret that he cannot pass the leadership to his daughter, played by the serene and stunningly beautiful Zhang Ziyi (Memoirs of a Geisha, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon). Gong Er has mastered both the 64 hand positions of her father's kung fu and the philosophy behind it.

Wong Kar Wai pays tribute to the martial arts of the past as Ip Man is tested by the other martial arts masters of the south before he must fight the best of the North in a friendly test of mastery.

"Your fireworks have fizzled," Ip Man whispers as he puts on the Panama Hat he wears in between fights. He only needs three hand positions -- spade, pin and sheath -- to beat the best of the best.

Wong Kar Wai and his cinematographer -- Philipe Le Sourd of Seven Pounds and A Good Year -- shoot wondrous brawls in rain and snow, a funeral procession by a frozen lake, a bloodless beatdown in an elaborate brothel. It's a gorgeous-looking film (shortened for North American release), whatever its other virtues and failings. Slow-motion chops and kicks, delicate choreography (by Yuen Woo-Ping), extreme close ups of a match being lit, a cigarette burning, a button, torn from a coat that is symbolic of the life China's wars interrupted, dress the film up but slow it down. Lovely colourized newsreel footage and sepia-toned scenes that dissolve into still photographs capture the flow of history.

The story, touching on the Second World War, skipping over the Chinese Civil War and glossing over Ip Man's reasons for fleeing to Hong Kong just as the communists took over the country, is more ambitious than streamlined. We lose track of Ip Man, here and there, to follow Gong Er's sad, romantic story.

But it's still a majestic version of a life story that merits this sort of treatment, at least within the world of martial arts, and the ageless Leung and Ziyi bring this stately, static film thrillingly to life just often enough to give Ip Man and his legacy his due.

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